Christian Morton looked through his mind’s eye after the final game of his Illinois football career Saturday and saw “nothing but a mirror of the whole season.”
“We have to stop the run and we can’t have turnovers,” the senior cornerback said. “Those were the things that beat us today and those were the same things that haunted us all season.”
Illinois’ 37-20 loss to Northwestern concluded a 1-11, 0-8 season in which its only conquest came against Division I-AA Illinois State.
“It’s very tough to go through what we went through this year; it’s tough, obviously, on those seniors,” coach Ron Turner said. “You don’t want to see anybody go through this in their last year, especially this group of guys that has given us everything they’ve got.
“Coming into the season, we knew we were going to have a lot of new, young players offensively. I thought the defense could keep us in games while the offense grew. Obviously, it didn’t happen.”
The Illinois defense was shredded game after game. In Saturday’s second half, Northwestern’s Jason Wright and Noah Herron ran through it as if it were made of tissue paper. In surmounting a 13-7 deficit, Wright finished with 251 rushing yards, Herron contributed 163 and wide receiver Brandon Horn added 49 on two reverses in the fourth quarter.
Six turnovers, meanwhile, stymied the Illini’s effort to counter the Wildcats’ unstoppable ground game. Illinois lost two fumbles and starting quarterback Dustin Ward was intercepted three times. And Ward’s replacement–Chris Pazan– was intercepted by Marvin Ward, who ran it back 69 yards for the game’s final touchdown.
With 47 seconds left in the half, Travis Williams recovered a Herron fumble at the NU 42, providing a splendid opportunity for the Illini to increase their 13-7 advantage. Ward immediately completed passes of 4 yards to Carey Davis and 17 yards to Mark Kornfeld to the NU 21. But Ward then threw an incomplete pass, was sacked for a 7-yard loss and was penalized for intentionally grounding the football. That pushed the ball back to the 42, where he threw another incompletion.
“We were in field-goal range [when the ball was on the 21-yard line] and getting some points would have been big,” Turner said. “But it hurt us way more than it should have. That’s how fragile our confidence was.
“I told our team in the locker room [after the game] that we’re not as far off [from being successful] as a lot of people think. In a lot of our games we had some opportunities that could have turned the game around and didn’t take advantage of them. I said back in January that I like this football team and I still do.”
